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Soham Parekh is all the rage on Twitter right now with a bunch of startups coming out of the woodwork saying they either had currently employed him or had in the past.

Serious question: why aren't so many startups hiring processes filtering out a candidate who is scamming/working multiple jobs?

Recently there was a post [1] about numpy being not easy to work with when using arrays of shape greater than 2.

  One of the problems mentioned in [1] is that  you can not use python loops because they are slow.  In J you can solve for example 100 equations using the rank concept, this is a simple  example:

   a=: 2 2 $ 1 1 1 _1
   b=: 10 2 $ ? 20 # 10
   solutions =: b %. "(1 _) a

So I would suggest somthing like numpy.linalg.solve(a,b,rank=(1,inf))

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43996431

My company is increasingly pushing prompt engineering as the single way we "should" be coding. The CEO & CTO are both obsessed with it and promote things like "delete entire unit test file & have claude generate a new one" rather than manually address test failures.

I'm a 'senior engineer' with ~5 years of industry experience and am considering moving on from this company because I don't want

1. Be pushed into a workflow that will cause my technical growth to stall or degrade 2. Be overseeing a bunch of AI-generated spaghetti 2-3 years from now

Feel free to address my specific situation but I'm interested in more general opinions.

Hello,

A Little Background About Me:

I'm a software developer from Iraq, after getting my BSc in CS, I started looking for local jobs, but failed to find any developer jobs in my current city. I applied to openings in other cities, but the the number of openings were so little compared to the number of applicants so the competition was crazy, I couldn't get a job for about a year.

Afterwards, I found a role as a teacher, so, I started teaching programming fundamentals and web development, I kept this job for 2 years, during which I tried applying to as much software development jobs as possible on LinkedIn and everywhere else, mainly looking for fully remote roles in the US or elsewhere.

Then, I found a role at a startup as a paid intern, gotten through the interview and started work as a contractor.

My initial contract was for 6 months, after that was over I signed a different contract for another 6 months, this time as a Jr. Software Developer. After this contract ended, they renewed it again as a Jr. Software Developer, but this time for 4 months, because the startup was failing. So, in total I worked as fully remote contractor for 1 year and 4 months.

Then, I was jobless, I started looking for jobs again for about 6 months, then out of nowhere, the same employer from before got in touch with me and recommended me to a different startup looking for contractors. I happily accepted the offer and started work, the problem is, I wasn't even assigned a title in this new startup, I was a software developer, but I didn't know whether Jr, Mid? However, based on my own evaluation I still considered myself Jr.

I was the only developer on the frontend team for this new startup, I was responsible of taking a full Figma design from scratch and implement it with React, I have to be honest I had to use a component library to get the job done, because the deadline was very close and everything was fast paced, there was no room for code refactoring, code quality, TBF I didn't even write tests! But, I ended up delivering in time, and after a couple of rounds of bug fixing, the client was happy.

However, after about 8 months, I lost this job because the startup failed to secure funding again.

Now, I feel a bit lost on where to move on from here. Getting a job for a US-based employer is very difficult, especially once they learn that I am based in Iraq.

I have a couple of questions:

1. Am I a dead cause? Is there still hope? I mean I am still a Jr.

2. How should I structure my resume? I have no past projects other than the work I've put for my past 2 employers?

I see a lot of people using some scripts with tmux and dotenv/direnv.

I’m wondering if you have any clever productivity hacks for switching between different projects, managing infrastructure services, secrets, tools, versions etc.

https://medium.com/@hacker_might/500-ot-devices-exposed-online-without-login-an-ethical-deep-5d6be16200fd

No lab. No physical device. Just internet-facing OT systems and one curious mind.

This research started with a simple Fofa query and turned into the discovery of over 500 industrial OT devices exposed online — no login, no authentication. All found remotely, responsibly reported, and disclosed for public awareness.

It proves one thing: you don’t need access to hardware to uncover real-world OT risks — just the right mindset and the will to look deeper.

We’re building an AI-powered reading assistant that lives inside Zotero.

Users can ask questions, get answers with source highlights, and see visual summaries.

Looking for Zotero users who want to test and give feedback. In return: *lifetime free access.*

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScOTMnXAVZoEf0YwXrBa0yAkAEAX_5LPjEkEMjpR8IawAXaTA/viewform?usp=dialog

Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER, your location, and whether remote work is a possibility.

Please only post if you are personally looking to hire a freelancer or work as one. Agencies, recruiters, job boards, and so on, are off topic here.

What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?

Hello all,

I bought a camera and I found that I love taking pictures. However after a year or two of taking pictures I’ve found myself in a rut. I don’t know what to do with the pictures or how to share them with others because I cannot use social media (other than HN and LinkedIn.) I personally have just found the scrolling and infinite content mechanisms are way too addicting for me, so I stay off of it.

This leads to my photos just sitting in Dropbox, often unedited because I don’t have motivation to edit them, because the most I’d do with them is share with family / a few close friends, and put them on a website nobody looks at. If I could find a way to share with others it might motivate me to put more effort into it.

I’m wondering if people have any ways they’ve found to share their art with others that doesn’t involve social media.

Please state the location and include REMOTE for remote work, REMOTE (US) or similar if the country is restricted, and ONSITE when remote work is not an option.

Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no recruiting firms or job boards. One post per company. If it isn't a household name, explain what your company does.

Please only post if you are actively filling a position and are committed to responding to applicants.

Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about something. It's off topic here.

Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.

Searchers: try https://dheerajck.github.io/hnwhoishiring/, https://amber-williams.github.io/hackernews-whos-hiring/, http://nchelluri.github.io/hnjobs/, https://hnresumetojobs.com, https://hnhired.fly.dev, https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/, https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com, or this (unofficial) Chrome extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-hiring-pro/mpfal....

Don't miss these other fine threads:

Who wants to be hired? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44434574

Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44434575

Share your information if you are looking for work. Please use this format:

  Location:
  Remote:
  Willing to relocate:
  Technologies:
  Résumé/CV:
  Email:

Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities.

There's a site for searching these posts at https://www.wantstobehired.com.

As both the economy and policy of the US shift rapidly and show signs of accelerating, I hear more and more of my colleagues voicing the desire to up stakes and relocate to somewhere more stable and in line with their own values--an opinion that I share. But getting visa sponsorship in much of the developed world is a scattershot effort; best I can tell, it's almost something you have to track down on a per-company basis, prioritizing the larger ones for access.

This feels like a hole in a quickly growing market--are there firms or orgs that help consolidate visa-sponsoring job info for high-demand professions, particularly in tech? Most of what I've seen out there is generic guidance and https://relocate.me, or is EU-focused for folks already in the EEU.

First of all, this is purely a personal learning project for me, aiming to combine three of my passions: photography, software engineering, and my family memories. I have a large collection of family photos and want to build an interactive experience to explore them, ala Google or Apple Photo features.

My goal is to create a system with smart search capabilities, and one of the most important requirements is that it must run entirely on my local hardware. Privacy is key, but the main driver is the challenge and joy of building it myself (an obviously learn).

The key features I'm aiming for are:

Automatic identification and tagging of family members (local face recognition).

Generation of descriptive captions for each photo.

Natural language search (e.g., "Show me photos of us at the beach in Luquillo from last summer").

I've already prompted AI tools for a high-level project plan, and they provided a solid blueprint (eg, Ollama with LLaVA, a vector DB like ChromaDB, you know it). Now, I'm highly interested in the real-world human experience. I'm looking for advice, learning stories, and the little details that only come from building something similar.

What tools, models, and best practices would you recommend for a project like this in 2025? Specifically, I'm curious about combining structured metadata (EXIF), face recognition data, and semantic vector search into a single, cohesive application.

Any and all advice would be deeply appreciated. Thanks!

I’m looking for interactive, browser-based (preferably WASM-powered) websites for those interested to learn and practice Bash, Linux commands, and general CLI skills. Any good ones you’ve used or seen?

We’re a small software house that’s been developing a niche SaaS platform for cultural events over the past 15 years. The product works well, but we were thinking to rebuild it for the next year.

Recently, a well-known national brand — not in tech, but operating in retail — approached us. As part of their PR strategy, they run a medium-sized cultural festival once a year in their home country.

They want to use our platform — but with a hard no to licensing. They’ve had bad past experiences where vendors either raised prices or disappeared, leaving them stranded.

We’re currently in a bidding process, alongside other companies. From what we understand, most competitors are creative agencies likely to: • build something from scratch, or • white-label past projects from similar events.

We estimate that building this kind of event app from scratch would cost around $60,000.

The options we’ve considered so far are:

1. Give them a snapshot of our current codebase, with no support, onboarding, or guarantees. This isn’t ideal — they would need to hire someone else to burn time understanding the architecture and logic before they could even begin implementing or customizing it. It’s slow and wasteful, considering we already know the product inside-out. 2. Give them a snapshot of the code and charge separately for the extra features they’ve asked for (that we don’t yet support). Based on our estimates, development would cost them between $13,500 (optimistic) and $38,000 (pessimistic) if done externally. 3. Same as above, but instead of giving them the code directly, we place it in escrow with a law firm of their choice. If we go out of business, or suddenly triple our rates to lock them in, they’d have the right to release the source and continue working with another vendor. This gives them peace of mind without requiring a full transfer up front.

*Ask HN: What would you do in our shoes?* Any strategic, technical, or legal insights are welcome. Has anyone navigated something similar?

After testing out Cluely with my team, we suspect that the easiest way to detect interview cheaters is to set simple "hallucination traps" where you ask a question that sounds plausible, but any knowledgeable person would instantly identify as a joke, fake, or just simply say they don't know. Vibe coded a simple app demonstrating the concept - https://beatcluely.com/

Here are some examples of this class of prompts which currently work on Cluely and even cause strong models like o4-mini-high to hallucinate, even when they can search the web:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d41a-c720-8005-879b-d28240534751 https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d450-6760-8005-8b7b-7bd776cff96b https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d578-1b2c-8005-b7b0-7a9148a40cef https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d59c-1820-8005-afb3-664e49c8b583 https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d5eb-3f88-8005-86b4-bf266e9d4ed9

Link to the vibe-coded code for the site: https://github.com/Build21-Eliot/BeatCluely

In late 2023, I had hospital expenses outside of the USA, and spent about $3k out of pocket. I submitted the claims to Cigna, but even though I got email confirmations of my submission, it was only until 2024 (when Zoox, the employer who the insurance was through, got involved) that I could see the claims in my Cigna dashboard.

Zoox was initially helpful in getting Cigna to respond to the claims, and they let me know what additional information Cigna needed. Cigna gave inconsistent reasons for why my claims were rejected, including saying that I needed to resubmit due to my plan being 'handled by different department', and that a 'vendor outage... prevented many of [my] claims to come through’. There have also been at least two times that I have talked with Cigna over chat, only to have the chat die after the agent asks for more and more time.

Conversations with Cigna: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dNDsCJ0_LSed4CmCmkSPQYMA-MpDPL6vg9lVRR1rgOY/edit?usp=sharing

Eventually, Zoox stopped responding as well, though I have a followed up a few times through email.

Is there any way to get Cigna to have a good faith review of my claims? Any government agencies that can help me, or outside companies that can help with the appeal?

Inspired by this phenomenal write-up of the author's experience in rewriting tmux[1], I'd like to hear from HN: what codebases would benefit from a similar treatment? Or what codbases would you like to see get the 'star' treatment in some way or another -- an upgraded tech stack, modernization, or a rewrite in another language, or in a different idiom/pattern, that you think would be better suited to the job it does?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44455787

I see fine tune as one of the major ways companies like OpenAI, Perplexity, Claude companies differ when it comes to provide higher quality of answers (correct me if I am wrong).

One curious question is how do they fine tune rich data (markdown, html outputs, tables, graphs etc) at scale. Currently, performing fine tuning involves the laborious process of carefully editing inputs (prompts) and outputs one by one. Becomes more difficult as the data context increases and one has to carefully examine the input data and provide the right output including things like formatting, grammar, UI etc.

Considering such a wide variety of questions they are processing, it amazes me how are they doing it at scale. Any thoughts?

I just launched JS1024 — a creative coding challenge with a strict limit: 1024 bytes of JavaScript.

No libraries. No frameworks. Just raw code.

You can submit visual effects, generative art, tiny games, synths, or whatever you can fit into 1KB of JavaScript.

→ https://js1024.fun/

Think of it as a spiritual successor to JS1k or the 4k demoscene — with a modern twist.

Would love feedback, ideas, or help spreading the word. And if you’ve ever made a tiny JS demo, please share — I’d love to see it.

Almost all candidates nowadays seem to have some form of external help or LLM-based assistance setup during remote interviews.

This makes it increasingly difficult to fairly assess a candidate's actual skills and independent thinking ability.

How are interview processes changing at your company — or at places where you're interviewing — to adapt to this new reality?

Are there any new patterns, tools, or formats you're using to ensure a fair evaluation?

I built a SaaS in the video space. We are doing everything that makes it a great product. For example, storage, encoding, processing, minor transformation, sharing. The only thing I see that we haven't done yet is full scale editing, auto posting to social.

I posted to all channels (except HN) yet I don't see much demand. We clearly see how businesses, small and large, could benefit from our SaaS saving their staff at least 10 hours for real. Our initial testing shows it works great.

Is there slump in SaaS selling or are we doing something wrong. I am pretty sure it is the later.

Why businesses, especially marketing/sales leaders or product managers, won't show interest in our SaaS. My competition research shows they are growing fast.

Yet, I can't get anyone to use it for free when we clearly add more value for 1:1 feature comparision.

Am I missing something? Has all marketing changed to paid campaigns on Google or Influencer marketing on X, TikTok? We don't have a big (or even medium size) budget.

How do I sell my SaaS to SMBs and large corporations when they don't even reply.

I’m very much an AI skeptic. My limited exposure has me thinking, OK, it sometimes reduces typing, but it’s as often wrong as not, but then I hear people talking about big productivity increases with AI. So what are the tools people are using? Ideally, I don‘t want to have to learn a new IDE (I’m firmly ensconced in the Jetbrains family of IDEs), but I guess if I must I must. Pointers to good tutorials (I prefer text over video) and documentation would be welcome.

This is a question for senior programmers:

What helped you get "good taste" in how you think and approach your code? By "good taste" I mean sensitive intuitions, fast and deep understanding of code, quick spotting of problems that might occur, informed tradeoffs, good command of base principles that apply to many tools/frameworks/libraries/languages.

What did it for you? Books? Training? Mentors? A team/project? ___?

Experience, time and trial/error are obvious answers; I'm looking for what made the difference for you.

I'm also curious if you think this skill can be taught or accelerated, other than osmosis from a mentor.

Hi HN, Long time reader here. I am posting for the first time. I am building a SaaS after leaving my job in 2024. I was at one of the FAANG (sweat shop one). After FAANG I joined a mid-size company in Texas. I left on my own accord after seeing how terrible decision it was to leave FAANG. I was an engineer turned manager at both companies. I am not against managing but I am old enough now to be in L5 SWE role.

I am coming to realization that job was more comfortable than building the startup. I haven't stopped working for last 6 months and consistently worked 15-16 hours. I have to do so many things such as write code to some extent, sales, marketing, administrative work, compliance, keeping track of accounts, managing churn. It just never ends.

It's been a hell of experience but we (team of 2) are not even bringing in survival money. We had two customers and lost one recently. What a shame!

We raised money from an unknown VC group (sub $100k) but it has been total disaster. They actually pulled us down, misguided us, and demanded things that we do things "their" way. I wish I had never applied or took funding. It has left a bitter taste in my mouth regarding VC. They have no network and in fact they bad mouthed us to a few investors we met with that resulted in some investers ghosting us completely.

Now, we are facing a dilemma. We are giving it one last push before we shut things down. Here is the problem - 1. We are in the domain where we have no expertise in. We are technologists and generalists (Data, ML, AI, Python, C++). Implementation and technical solutions are never problem for us. We can build.

2. I have read and come to realization that without network there is no business. Either you have existing network of founders, customers or you make one through VCs like YC. How sweet is that anything you build you have buyers lined up or at least providing great advice and early validation.

Should we pivot to completely new domain? We dont have expertise in one particular domains area (accounting, tax, supply chain etc.), but we have good knowledge of technology software (think data pipelines, ML, AI models). If we do software for software (e.g. Cursor, Lovable), we worry that closed source might hurt us. Do you think having open source would be a better path for making money?

We can back to job market but things are not green on other side and it is taking 6 months or so for people to get jobs based on my reading. I want to try one last time.

We are stuck without much guidance. What would be your recommendation?

Given Google’s non-acquisition of Character.ai and Meta’s recent moves, how are investors and start ups dealing with the threat that it’s easier and cheaper for large companies to poach key talent rather than buying the company?

With the good ol' www dying an unfortunate dead internet theory death by drowning in AI slop, I think we need to start thinking about how to create an alternative that allows for authentic communication between actual humans without LLMs shitting it up.

The question is how.

One vague idea I've had is a system based on a web of trust [0], as used in PGP. We could bring back key signing parties and build a protocol that filters content by trust levels.

Just throwing stuff out there. Maybe anyone has a better idea?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust